Battle for George Sq.
An East Kilbride director brings a thought-provoking play about the Red Clydesiders to the local stage this week to mark the centenary of the famous battle.
Graeme Dallas’successful acting career has taken him to Iceland, Estonia, Russia and The Ukraine, but this week he is back on home soil to direct‘the Battle for George Square’.
The date is January 31, 1919 and 80,000 strikers – many of whom are soldiers returning from the trenches of France and facing extreme poverty – pour into Glasgow’s George Square to protest against mass unemployment and having to work a 47-hour week.
Things soon got out of hand as the police baton charge the crowd. The riot act was read and the leaders arrested. The secretary of war, Winston Churchill; felt that Scotland was on the verge of a socialist revolution and ordered the tanks to be sent on to the streets of Glasgow.
The Scottish soldiers at Maryhill barracks were locked in, in case they joined the strikers and English soldiers were sent to Glasgow with machine guns being placed on the roof of the city chambers.
Scotland was a tinder box of revolutionary fever. The personal cost of the uprising has not been told the leaders of the strike being sent to prison and suffered many deprivations but their names went down in Scottish history as the Red Clydesiders.
To mark the centenary of this landmark battle, the Three China’s theatre company are re-enacting the events that led towards this pivotal moment in Scottish history, showing the heroic events as well as the great Glasgow humour that saw them survive.
Graeme told Lanarkshire Live:“we don’t get this part of Scottish history in school so it is a great opportunity to portray such a momentous period of our history. The ordinary man and woman survived this time through good old fashion Scottish humour and this is very much reflected in the play.”
The play runs at EK Arts Centre this Thursday and Friday at 7.30pm.